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By Marc Altshuller, IBM

Our Watson technology has clearly captured the public’s imagination. But the question plenty of people have had is, "What can its cognitive computing powers do for you and me in our everyday lives?"

The answer is quite a lot.

Because now any business professional inside a company can have its powerful analytics at their fingertips through an intuitive new service built on the cloud called Watson Analytics. This is analytics for everyone. It’s a step that will revolutionize the analytics landscape.

Rather than only statisticians or computer scientists having access to the kinds of technologies that help us truly understand our customers, employees, and operations, Watson Analytics is making it possible for people in every department -- whether finance, HR, marketing, or operations -- to type in questions such as, “What are the key drivers of my product sales?” or, “Which deals are the most likely to close?” and get the answers they need.

In other words, we'll be using a service that works by typing in questions the way we would ask another colleague or ourselves.

It’s one more step towards cognitive computing, a new era of computing. We’re moving from the age of machines programmed by humans to perform specific tasks to systems capable of learning from their interactions with data and humans, understanding questions the way we humans ask them, and analyzing huge streams of information to draw insights from them.

This new approach will transform how we work in countless ways. Because if information drives our economy, democratizing the ability to pull insights out of that data will turbocharge it. We’ve already seen how, as consumers with information at our fingertips, we’ve rewritten the rules for how companies connect with us and upended the control marketers wielded over branding and messaging.

Now, that same access to information combined with analytics will remake our jobs. Data-driven insight will become an everyday part of how we solve problems, make better decisions and drive better results. Rather than waiting for special experts in special circumstances, Watson Analytics will be a tool we all use proactively and constantly.

Because some of Watson Analytics' most important innovations are the ones we all need to get our jobs done. Watson Analytics makes sense of raw feeds of data, without us needing to be a computer scientist. It ranks results based on how statistically "interesting" they are, making suggestions for how we could best tackle a problem. It uses predictive analytics to pull up facts or patterns we might have ignored. It fine tunes answers based on past questions, helping spark new questions.

For instance, if you’re in HR, this kind of analytical discovery will help you figure out which employees are at risk of leaving and give you suggestions about the best steps you can take to encourage each different individual to stay, whether it’s a pay raise or a flexible work schedule.

In customer service, you could constantly sift through ever-changing data to drill down into different segments of customers, getting recommendations about which enticements you should tailor to the most valuable individuals. Or which customers are in jeopardy of switching vendors in the next 30 days and the offers most likely to encourage them to stay with your firm.

In sales, while sitting in an airport, you could conduct business, such as studying how you could attract, retain and add more customers by nurturing the right leads while you’re in a certain city.

When analytics is applied to problems, decisions get smarter and more insightful. Now, with the power of advanced cognitive-powered predictive analytics in the hands of virtually every employee inside a company, we have am opportunity to use information to transform how we work.